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Date: 2/10/2021
EASTHAMPTON – After receiving the needed funding from the City Council, Easthampton can continue the process of managing and organizing its old municipal records.
The City Council approved a supplemental budget appropriation of $50,000 to begin the second portion of the city’s record management project. The funding was transferred from the cannabis impact fee stabilization fund.
City Clerk Barbara LaBombard told the council this appropriation would fund a second phase of the process of properly organizing, cataloging, storing and destroying records that are currently stored in the basement of the municipal office building at 50 Payson Ave. The first phase, which was funded by the Community Preservation Act (CPA), studied and assessed the city’s current situation.
More records are stored in the basement of Old Town Hall and that portion of the project is being funded by Community Preservation Act funding as they are historical documents.
Speaking in favor of the appropriation, Mayor Nicole LaChapelle called the project a first step toward better access to and organization of city records. She noted the coronavirus pandemic had illustrated the need for increased remote access and also noted the end result would be improved means through which the public and municipal employees could reference public records.
As part of her presentation, LaBombard showed the council a series of photographs of the current storage, including stacks of unboxed records lining the basement walls as well as lines of filing cabinets and shelving units.
“All of these filing cabinets have a lot of old school records that were just brought over from the building on Main Street when we moved into 50 Payson Ave. in 2003,” she said.
Other photos of the Old Town Hall basement illustrated, among other things, the poor condition of the town’s vault. LaBombard explained all municipalities are required to have a vault for town records. The one at the Old Town Hall is the city’s only vault and she described it as “not adequate,” sharing photographs of pipes lining its back wall and a grate that opens to the outside, exposing the records to moisture. Some volumes in the vault included old treasurer’s documents, which she was unsure if the town needed to preserve, illustrating the need for the service.
Chris Chartrand, regional sales manager for King Information, said his company would work in these spaces to organize them properly, identify which records must be kept and which can be destroyed and provide a tracking software mechanism that will provide a catalog of the location of each stored document.
“This is not anything we have not seen before,” Chartrand said of the condition of Easthampton’s records. “We specialize in understanding what records have value on all the different scales – which is regulatory, operational, historic – and really then with the spaces at your disposal, what is the best way to control those records – both getting rid of those things you don’t need to maintain any longer and carefully and properly label and identify and locate all of the things that you then must maintain.”
LaBombard also noted that more records are currently stored at the Public Safety Complex and the Council on Aging, but the current priority is the documents at 50 Payson Ave. and the Old Town Hall.
The council also approved a supplemental budget appropriation of $34,676 to cover the cost of a one-week health insurance tax deduction holiday in fiscal year 2021.
Councilor Daniel Rist said the Finance Committee unanimously supported the appropriation. The “holiday” was a negotiated benefit as a result of favorable insurance premiums.
“The councilors may remember that we approved paying for a premium holiday that was negotiated between the collective bargaining units and the insurance groups representing them. They get a premium holiday for the first year, but they weren’t entitled to a new premium holiday unless the premiums for the healthcare were under 2 percent,” he said, adding that the rates did not increase. “We’re kind of obligated to do this because of the union agreement.”
The council was also prepared to discuss the addition of Granby to the regional veterans services district shared by Easthampton and South Hadley, but LaChapelle asked that the item be pulled from the agenda and she would present it at a future City Council meeting.
“I need to come back and ask for your permission to negotiate an inter-municipal agreement because the agreement to be negotiated between three other municipalities to provide veterans service,” she explained.
Granby had been part of the district previously, but left to pursue its own service, but has now requested to re-join. The veterans district board has put forward a recommendation in favor of readmitting Granby.